House Chairperson Minister of Public Works
Ministers & Deputy Ministers
Hon. Chairperson and Whip of our Committee (Hon. Mjobo & Ntobongwana, respectively)
Honourable Members Fellow South Africans
Let me start by appreciating the honour of participating in the debate on the Department of Public Works and Infrastructure Budget vote, with particular focus on the public entities of the department which are the Council of Built Environment (CBE), Construction Industry Development Board (CIDB), Independent Development Trust, and Agreement SA.
It is particularly humbling that I address you on this particular day, - the eve of Africa Day and also the day on which the first SONA in 1994 by President Mandela was held and would like to borrow from the words of wisdom that he shared with the nation when remembering Ingrid Jonker as “...an AFRIKANER woman who transcended a particular experience and became a South African, an African and a citizen of the world”
He further stated that “in the midst of despair, she celebrated hope, confronted with death, she asserted the beauty of life. In the dark days when all seemed hopeless in our country, when many refused to hear her resonant voice, she took her own life.
To her and others like her, we owe a debt to life itself. To her and others like her, we owe a commitment to the poor, the oppressed, the wretched and the despised”
As a Nation we find our economy in the shadow of dark days where all seems hopeless confronted by poverty, high unemployment rate and astronomical inequality.
These Entities have a duty and a responsibility to help the Nation to transcend the current stormy waters, to also live up to what our constitution so profoundly implores all of us in its preamble “to improve the quality of life of all citizens and free the potential of each person”.
Honourable Members, Our public entities play an important role in concretising our tasks of providing policy leadership to the wider construction and property sectors.
They make regulations that seek to transform the industry.
Construction Industry Development Board
The Construction Industry Development Board (cidb) has a new board appointed on 01 December 2021. The CIDB Amendment Bill is in the final stages of development by our department and will be taken through the consultation phase in the early part of the 2022/23 financial year.
This Bill provides for a client recognition scheme that will direct and monitor client departments, on the technical capacity required to deliver infrastructure projects.
The CIDB has also partnered with the Jobs Fund, a government initiative under the aegis of the National Treasury.
The main responsibility of the CIDB is to implement the Construction Industry Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) Development Project which has since gained traction.
The CIDB, in the 2021 financial year capacitated 135 client departments across all spheres of government.
Some of the targets for the Best practice (Best Practice, Unity, Implementation, Leadership, and Development) B.U.I.L.D Programme, to be incrementally built up over a five-year period are:
• Around 1 000 contractors will receive developmental support per year
• On public sector contracts:
• R450m spend on workplace training per year
• 10 000 learning opportunities per year for FET learners/artisans
• 1 500 learning opportunities for candidates
For the current year CIDB allocation is R80 000 000 Independent Development Trust
The IDT is being transformed and reconfigured into a client-centric, fit for purpose and financially sustainable entity that can realise its value proposition of delivering infrastructure on time, within budget, at the right quality, so as to take its rightful place in the infrastructure delivery value chain of the state.
IDT has gone through a lot of challenges in the past but we can now safely say has weathered the fiercest of storms and is headed for calmer waters.
In the last financial year a New Board has been appointed and is hard at work to strengthen governance and revitalise the entity.
(It must be noted that) The IDT headed by women as Chair and Deputy Chair has assured us of its vision to press ahead and reconfigure the IDT into a fit for purpose and financially sustainable entity.
Some of the notable achievements that the IDT notched up during the 2021/22 financial year, where the following:
• Sixteen (16) new facilities were completed against a target of fifteen (15) facilities.
• A total of 75 023 work opportunities were created through the Expanded Public Works Programme (Non-State Sector) against an annual target of 64 000 work opportunities. This was achieved even though programme implementation started late into the third quarter of the financial year.
The department has always supported IDT to keep it as a going concern – 93m – last financial year. We will continue to do so.
Council for Built Environment
It gives me great pleasure to announce that the CBE has consistently received clean audit for the past five years and has received a clean audit report, with no material financial findings for the 2020/21 financial year.
CBE’s procurement spend for 2021/22 is 89% for Historically Disadvantaged Individuals and youth.
The transformation of the built environment continues to be a national priority. To this end, since 27 February 2020 the CBE has set up Transformation Collaborative Committees (TCCs) to guide it through the process of transforming the built environment.
These TCCs are intended to deal with blockages in the transformation agenda within the industry focusing on areas such as:
• Procurement Legislation ( One size can’t fit all)
• Women Empowerment and Gender Equality
• Occupation Specific Dispensation (OSD)
• Professions Skills and Capacity Development; and
• Health, Safety, Public Protection and Universal Access (HSPPUA)
• Professional skills and Capacity Development involvement through youth involvement.
The CBE will continue to focus on coordinating and enabling the built environment skills pipeline, implementing the candidacy programme in the workplace by assisting 44 districts on the implementation of the candidacy programme.
We want the CBE to work hard and collaborate with various sectors to professionalise the Built Environment and address problematic issues such as poor workmanship and corruption.
CBE allocation for this financial year is 54 000 000 compared to 53 000 000 of the last financial year
Honourable chair, the last but not the least entity we would like to report on is :-
AGREMENT SOUTH AFRICA.
Although the entity is challenged with the availability of relevant expertise, especially in testing innovative products, Agreement South Africa processed and issued 16 certifications for innovative built environment products and systems in the year 2021/2022.
These included alternative building technologies.
We intend to continue holding the hand of this entity which is busy with a business plan for the establishment of a sustainability rating tool for public buildings and is currently administering a government, ready to be launched eco-labelling scheme on behalf of the Department.
ASA’s allocation this financial year is 34 000 000
In conclusion, Hon. Members we need to be reminded that all these Entities existed in one form or another pre-1994.
The golden thread in their current mandate is the duty to transform the sector into a more effective, reflective and responsive industry to our ambitions as a nation both in form and in content.
“This world was not created piecemeal. Africa was born no later and no earlier than any other geographical area on this globe. Africans, no more and no less than other men (people, humans), possess all human attributes, talents and deficiencies, virtues and faults.
Thousands of years ago, civilizations flourished in Africa which suffer not at all by comparison with those of other continents. In those centuries,
Africans were politically free and economically independent. Their social patterns were their own and their cultures truly indigenous. (Haile Selassie).”
